Ken Krakow
October 12th, 2002, 06:31 PM
I’ve been a still shooter for almost 25 years. I bought a GL2 about 2 months ago. I’ve done some family stuff and a short for a potter friend. I’ve just playing around and trying out this video thing.
Two weeks ago I was shooting a head shot of the boss at the local plant of “darn big international corporation.” When I was finished, one of his people asked me if I could do a video for a PowerPoint presentation. This video was going to be part of a presentation shown to the heads of the other 20+ plants across the county. “Uhhhh yeah” I blurted. “What do you need?” “A five minute video tour of the plant.” “How soon do you need it?” “5 days” he said.” I shot for about 4 hours the next day and sweated together the video over the weekend with Pinnacle studio 7 (I know, ick). The final video was 45 work station situations of about 5 seconds with 1 second speeded up strobed cuts of the tour placed between the station shots. For the 1 second tour cuts I just held the camera a waist level, hit the record button and ran their “standard tour” though the plant. The resulting mpg1 technical quality was equal to that of another professionally produced PowerPoint video that they had shown me.
The final product was a smashing success. Every single person that saw it just beamed; meanwhile, I was sincerely thinking how the heck did I pull that off? Their response was gratifying but I know at this point in my video career that I have no business taking on this kind of responsibility.
Now the question. The PowerPoint mpeg1 looks a little blurry but plays fine. When I try to put the mpg2 version to DVD or make a VHS tape there are a lot of problems in the output. Exploding big chunky pixels and frozen frames while the sound is fine. Is this a “feature” of fast moving violent cuts and speeded up pans of DV video or just the wrong software? I know that my client is going to want it on DVD or VHS but I can’t figure out how to do this successfully. Best analogy is trying to play a demanding game on an incompetent computer. Can this thing be saved or have I broken some major rules?
Best,
Ken
Two weeks ago I was shooting a head shot of the boss at the local plant of “darn big international corporation.” When I was finished, one of his people asked me if I could do a video for a PowerPoint presentation. This video was going to be part of a presentation shown to the heads of the other 20+ plants across the county. “Uhhhh yeah” I blurted. “What do you need?” “A five minute video tour of the plant.” “How soon do you need it?” “5 days” he said.” I shot for about 4 hours the next day and sweated together the video over the weekend with Pinnacle studio 7 (I know, ick). The final video was 45 work station situations of about 5 seconds with 1 second speeded up strobed cuts of the tour placed between the station shots. For the 1 second tour cuts I just held the camera a waist level, hit the record button and ran their “standard tour” though the plant. The resulting mpg1 technical quality was equal to that of another professionally produced PowerPoint video that they had shown me.
The final product was a smashing success. Every single person that saw it just beamed; meanwhile, I was sincerely thinking how the heck did I pull that off? Their response was gratifying but I know at this point in my video career that I have no business taking on this kind of responsibility.
Now the question. The PowerPoint mpeg1 looks a little blurry but plays fine. When I try to put the mpg2 version to DVD or make a VHS tape there are a lot of problems in the output. Exploding big chunky pixels and frozen frames while the sound is fine. Is this a “feature” of fast moving violent cuts and speeded up pans of DV video or just the wrong software? I know that my client is going to want it on DVD or VHS but I can’t figure out how to do this successfully. Best analogy is trying to play a demanding game on an incompetent computer. Can this thing be saved or have I broken some major rules?
Best,
Ken